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A game of hide and seek -for big kids

While he enjoyed a couple of beers, John Van Baal's hands -worn from the mines -tangled with a pound of wings. It was no contest.

In his own Maxville-flavoured words, the gravel-voiced 53-year-old tried to explain how he got into a hobby where he finds himself doing things like placing historical photographs of Milles Roches into an ammo can, then hiding it all in the middle of a forest.

John is a geocacher, or geocaching John if you prefer. But his moniker in this online-meets- reality world of hide and seek is "Dutchmaster", the brand of cigar his father used to smoke, and his old CB handle when he drove trucks.

Geocaching is a form of modern day treasure hunting that uses GPS co-ordinates. People from all over the world log on to a website called geocaching.comto either register a cache that they've created or to discover one they can seek out.

"It's the finding part," says Van Baal, with an expression on his face like he's revealed a secret. "It's the detective work."

About 14 of the local caches are designed by Van Baal, who studied digital electronics in college. He's also adopted a couple from people who have moved and can no longer maintain them. According to the rules at geocaching.com,people have to live within 50 kilometres of their caches. Van Baal, a former scuba diver and ghost town hunter, has created caches in places like LaRose Forest, the mountain biking trails by Caber Road, Loch Garry and Lost Villages.

"The common thread is for people to put them in spots they want to share with other people," Van Baal said. "There are certain places out there that need a cache. You can't just drop one anywhere."

Van Baal has a cache near the Long Sault Parkway. It has a gravel pit in the middle of the lake that he says is unique for visitors, who sign a guest log located inside the cache. He also called the topography of the area "fantastic."

At his Milles Roches cache, Van Baal's placed a photo of the area before the forced flooding in the late 1950s. It's part of a puzzle, he said, that leads them to an abandoned strip of road where the cache is located.

In the Cornwall area alone there are dozens of caches, or treasures, if you consider trinkets like key fobs or plastic toys to be treasure.

"The dollar store is the number one geocaching hangout," half-joked Van Baal, who works as a surface miner.

Van Baal now cares for the first cache created in the Cornwall area. It was established in 2001, about one year after geocaching took off. "It's historic and sought after," he said of the cache.

There's a hotel key in Van Baal's jacket pocket with identification tags attached to it. He explained that it's called a travel bug. The person who planted it hopes for geocachers to seek it out and help it travel to its owner's destination of choice. It's progress can be tracked online.

Van Baal has unearthed some 200 caches. Some have been placed inside fake stones on a stone wall, or in magnets attached to the back of a metal sign. He's even solved puzzle caches that link to multiple locations.

Regardless of the hiding place, Van Baal said trusting the GPS co-ordinates is the most important thing; although he said he understands it's hard to think you're on the right track when you start crossing rivers and fighting through thick forest.

"You always take the hard way in and the easy way out."

There's at least one tricky puzzle cache near St. Raphael's Ruins that Van Baal's yet to uncover. "I'll leave that for a special occasion," he said.